Many business processes in Public Sector, Financial Services, and ERP processes must coordinate and manage multiple documents for a variety of reasons including legal, compliance, and operational reasons. Such processes often have inherent latencies and inefficiencies in them that can be streamlined. This is because, unlike transactional data, documents are frequently “opaque” to the systems and the participants in the business process. Traditional models for handling documents such as web and email attachments as well as paper based flow from desk to desk need human intervention. Documents are manually retrieved, information manually extracted, and manual updates/cross referencing with Line Of Business applications, introduce inefficiencies in the process. There exist numerous efforts to automate such business processes with different technologies. In order to compare the effectiveness of such automations and implementations, there exists a need for a validation matrix with a standard set of metrics identified for each business process, which can be used to benchmark a specific implementation.
Considering for example, a large corporation with multiple divisions and business processes that aims at introducing new automated application to support a business process and to replace an existing paper-based manual document management process. A department responsible for a document process benefits by converting to an automatic document management process. The automated document management process has the potential of reducing labor and other costs of document management. However, using an automatic document management process requires employees in other departments to use electronic systems instead of paper forms, potentially increasing costs on those other departments. To effectively determine any advantage of changing to an automated system, this estimated cost increase is traded off against any overall efficiency gained by the automated document management system.
One example of a global logistics process is an “Import Compliance” process where the movement of goods across borders of countries must comply with regulations associated with border crossings. This is particularly relevant to Customs and Border Protection agencies where the Service ports serve as back offices of border crossings. Such service ports are typically inundated with documents associated with the customs clearing processes and incorporate significant and complex manual processes related to document handling. Automating the clearance processes using an electronic infrastructure, together with the automatic measurement of the validation metrics, allows the characterization of each service port with a validation matrix that can be used as a standard operational metric. The departments receiving the goods and tracking the movement of the goods gain in efficiency with an automated document management process. The department shipping the goods may lose in efficiency when using an automated document management process because of additional time required to electronically enter and process documents associated with goods.
Due to the different participants and systems used in document management systems, comparing performance of different types of automatic or manual global logistics processes is difficult. Presently, there exists no method for automatically tracking and evaluating performance of an automated logistics process to determine whether the technology provides overall improvement in the logistics operation for a company or user.
What is therefore needed is a system, a computer program product, and an associated method for automatically computing a validation matrix to analyze performance of a global logistics process. The need for such a solution has heretofore remained unsatisfied. The infrastructure supporting the global logistics process may include a combination of tools and technologies such as a document management system, front end adaptors, business rules engines and backend adaptors. Whatever be the choice of the solution, it remains critical to be able to measure the overall efficiency of the logistics operation using a standard set of metrics.